When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

as a childthere was eitherbooksorpain.i chose books.-how i became a writer

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

What? You mean this crap shack isn't part of the Four Seasons. Shocking.

What is important is to believe in something so strongly that you're never discouraged.

There is always need for good foster parents, people who have room in their homes, the openhearted people.

He who is prepared for the future and he who deals cleverly with any situation that may arise are both happy; but the fatalistic man who wholly depends on luck is ruined.

This is official today. China has surpassed the U.S. and now has the No. 1 economy in the world. After hearing this, China's children asked, 'So now can we take a lunch break?'

Pure essence, and pure matter, and the two joined into one were shot forth without flaw, like three bright arrows from a three-string bow.

A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.

You'd rather own gold; not the miner